Please read my previous posts as well as those of Lyoncet. I have already mentioned it that bazar/market is a must building which u'll always construct whether u are Arabia or any other civ. So the point that bazar has to be constructed is moot. The only advantage Dutch UA have is that it comes into action early but not so much earlier than bazar. U won't get start selling luxuries on turn 1 so it will too take some time to establish ur trading.
It is just like saying that Chariot archers are going to best Keshliks because they come earlier. There are many other factors u need to consider before deciding which one is better.
Thanks for that.
Additionally, something I kind of hinted at but didn't explicitly say, is that not only do markets/Bazaars come online early, the lag between the point where you'll usually start selling your resources and the point where you'd get Bazaars isn't even that great. East India isn't providing you a turn-1 benefit. It provides you a benefit once you've researched your luxury techs, gotten a worker, and improved your tile. That's a good chunk of the pre-market era, when you consider how little time it takes before you're forced to start building markets anyways because they're necessary not long into the game.
Also, please note that East India doesn't give you extra money. It gives you extra happiness. That means this small window of opportunity shrinks even further when you realize that in lots of games, depending on how much food you can produce, how many cities you can afford to expand to, etc., that extra happiness which you cannot turn into gold may not even do much for you. Yes, with extra happiness you can maintain positive
, but again, that window disappears quickly, and regardless, I find it's usually best to sell those early resources even if it puts you into negatives so you can get more units/libraries/cities whathaveyou. Maybe you'll squeeze an extra 2 or 4 population out of your cities really early on as a result. But maybe not. Either way, in 50 turns you'd be much better served by a different unique anyways, and for the reasons I mentioned a few days back those are much more powerful. I won't reiterate all of them in full, but I'm talking about things like being able to turn them into gold, or twice the happiness bonus, and getting extra happiness/gold per resource instead of per type of resource (very relevant due to resource clustering), etc.
Now this isn't saying that East India Company is bad. An ability that can net you an extra 10 or so happiness is pretty good. But the particulars really don't, IMO, bear out the opinion that just being early is enough to make EIC better than a watered-down Bazaar, which is the point most of us have taken up I believe. For the same reason, as babri so eloquently noted, that Chariot Archers aren't better than Keshiks. There's a
lot more that has to be taken into account than the opportunity cost.